If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs

If anyone finds this interesting, I'd like to plug my post analyzing a similar technique, but generalized for perspective pixel art: https://tesseractc.at/shadowglass

One of the best games I've ever played. I might play it again now that it's been a few years and I can't remember the solutions.

This is great from a technical and artistic perspective. But for me personally, the visual style ruined a great game. I love detective/deduction games. I'm listing some of my all-time favorites in this genre. I'd love to finish Obra Dinn, but god it just makes my eyes hurt so much.

The Case of the Golden Idol

Chants of Sennaar

Her Story

IMMORTALITY

The Painscreek Killings

The Roottrees are Dead

Type Help

I gave this game a shot but honestly the art style got in the way of the gameplay for me. Fun to read how much effort went into it

I grew up on the small 6 inch 1 bit Mac SE display so the art style has a special place in my heart. Sadly I'm too "dumb" to fully enjoy the game as it requires a lot of attention to detail -- amazing if you enjoy detective style puzzles! I still highly respect it.

I built a mini game with this technique [1][2]

[1] https://dither.blode.co

[2] https://github.com/mblode/dither-3d

I absolutely loved this game. I still think about it often, the story and the characters. I wish there was more games like it.

Interesting read!

When the Mac and Atari ST first hit the market in the 80's, there were Comics created in this 1-bit "ordered-dither" style. For error-diffusion dithering (Floyd-Steinberg etc.), you needed more bits per pixel, to carry the error.

SHATTER:

https://imgur.com/gallery/shatter-1984-was-first-commerciall...

Robot Empire:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atarist/comments/xgs4rh/comicbook_c...

Previous discussion of "Stabilizing the Obra Dinn 1-bit dithering process (2017)" on 08-nov-2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42084080 114 comments

Actually saw a great youtube video about this recently - very cool how they were able to accomplish this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3qzyAHMoUU

This is so cool! Excellent writeup also.

I feel like I understand it all except the last step:

> I could feel the closeness, and a very simple fix for this kind of aliasing is to supersample: apply the dither thresholding at a higher resolution and downsample.

Here he shows a dither pattern that isn't monochrome, but has grays (cause it's downsampled). But the picture in the end is monochrome again. How does this work? How does he downsample the dithered result while staying monochrome?

I've never gotten motion sickness playing a video game before Return of the Obra Dinn. it's sad because I hear it's a good game but it's absolutely unplayable for me

I keep feeling like there's a set of fundamental assumptions that can be optimized for, or relaxed and optimized for, in order to get at what a better method might be.

For example, stability of dithering under rotation and or some type of shear translation. What about stability under scaling?

There's been some other methods that essentially create a dither texture on the surface itself but, to me at least, this has a different quality than the "screen space" dithering that Obra Dinn employs.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this idea more rigorous? Or is the set of assumption fundamentally contradictory?

What a fascinating deep dive. 2x with sphere mapping is my favourite - it starts to take on a sort of pointillism-like quality which gives all the objects (or maybe my brain) a sort of understanding of their texture.

One of my favorite games of all time. An incredible kind of puzzle, oozing with its own weird style.

I remember following dukope‘s well-written devlog back then. Even tried to reproduce his edge detection for a game jam. Thanks for digging this out.

The final dithering effect appears to be mis-sampled and is no longer 1 bit per pixel

> It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won't be noticed by its absence. Exactly no one will think, "man this dithering is stable as shit. total magic going on here." I don't want to give people problems they didn't know they should have though so it was worth fixing.

I mean maybe it's just me, but that is literally the first thing I noticed and I appreciated it so much I instantly bought the game. I don't even play video games much!

These techniques were all the rage on early Macintosh things

“The output is no longer 1-bit”

I thought that constraint was the whole idea?

> Finding this particular spherical mapping took some time. There's no way to perfectly tile a square texture onto a sphere. It would've been possible to redefine the dither matrices in terms of a hexagon grid or something else that does tile on a sphere.

Hexagon grids are flat and can't tile a sphere. Nothing can tile a sphere without knowing some specifics about the sphere, and even then you're pretty much limited to "orange slices", pole-to-pole longitudinal sweeps.

(2017)

see also: https://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/

Never seen such a stable dithering before. Very nice!

(2017)